“I don’t give a damn about semi-radicals!”
Helen Keller was also a Wobbly (member of IWW), campaigned to try to save Joe Hill from execution, and faced McCarthyist persecution: she’d welcomed back US volunteers from the Spanish Civil War.
From the 1916 interview to which I’ve linked (in which she also speaks approvingly of the French Revolution):
“I was religious to start with” she began in enthusiastic acquiescence to my request. “I had thought blindness a misfortune.”
“Then I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.
"Then I read HG Wells’ Old Worlds for New, summaries of Karl Marx’s philosophy and his manifestos. It seemed as if I had been asleep and waked to a new world - a world different from the world I had lived in.
"For a time I was depressed” - her voice saddened in reminiscence- “but little by little my confidence came back and I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that society has advanced so far in spite of them. And now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!”
Click to viewFrom the 1916 interview to which I’ve linked (in which she also speaks approvingly of the French Revolution):
“I was religious to start with” she began in enthusiastic acquiescence to my request. “I had thought blindness a misfortune.”
“Then I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.
"Then I read HG Wells’ Old Worlds for New, summaries of Karl Marx’s philosophy and his manifestos. It seemed as if I had been asleep and waked to a new world - a world different from the world I had lived in.
"For a time I was depressed” - her voice saddened in reminiscence- “but little by little my confidence came back and I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that society has advanced so far in spite of them. And now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!”